PES Chronicles

And season 12 had started off so well… I was 2nd after 10 games, scoring freely, and everything was fine. Just dandy. But now things have changed. I’ve played my way through to the mid-season point—that’s another 8 league matches, and all of the Champions League group stage. In the latter competition, I’ve sailed through, no problems at all. But in the League? There I have hit a mysterious slump.

Suddenly it’s a run of games where I can’t win, and can hardly score a goal—and they’re all league games. In the Champs League I’m as free-scoring as I’ve been all season, and winning. In the league it’s as if an invisible hand is squeezing all the pizzazz out of my team. I smell a giant rat.

I had a key game against Tottenham, currently the all-conquering new stars of Division 1. I won it 1-0 with an ugly, deflected, scrambled goal in the last minute. There hasn’t been much else to cheer me up. After a few dodgy seasons, Manchester City are back as a major force. They’ve battered me every time I’ve met them this season, and they did so again, 0-3 at home.

The PES2010 AI has a method of getting the ball off you that I call ‘tangle and snatch’. Tangle and snatch. It might sound like the next buddy cop movie, or a corny, straight-to-digital-TV cop show, but it’s not that. It’s what PES2010 does to you when it decides it wants the ball and you are no longer allowed to have it. As is well known, response times in PES2010 are not what they were in previous iterations of the franchise. This enables the AI to swarm you with its players, and tangle you up, and snatch possession.

I know, I know. I just need to play better. I do know that. But I think I’m allowed to nurse some PES-based paranoia. When you sink this many hours into a game (217 and counting), you’re entitled to think it might be coming to get you sometimes.

After this very dodgy run of poor league form, I find myself 10 points off the pace at the halfway stage. The title is not out of reach. As long as I play well enough, the same invisble hand that I’ve sensed keeping me down will raise me up. Or bring other teams down, which amounts to the same thing.

My Champions League group has been a cakewalk. I had trouble in one match, against FC Basel 1895, who turned in the statutory Brazilliant performance that random teams in ML have sometimes just got to do. Otherwise I won them all and scored a nice few goals. I even simmed the meaningless last fixture against Atalanta. I haven’t simmed a match for about 8 seasons now. I’ll only ever do so under circumstances like this, when there could be no effect on any league standings. The game awarded me a 2-1 win, which was good of it.

I’ll face RC Lens in the quarter final. This is the stage where I hit a brick wall last season. I’ll try to be careful against Lens. Also in the draw—for the second season running—was PES United, among a few other bizarre teams.

Finally a few goals from the current period. The frst two are both from McCann, my Youth DMF who has turned into a 26-year-old veteran of many a midfield skirmish. Both of his goals look like the same goal, on first viewing. But they’re really not. This impression is boosted by them both coming against teams wearing near-identical kits: Arsenal in the first case, Aston Villa in the second. And finally in theclip there’s a super-duper-long-ranger from Zaki in the Champions League. I do love me some distance shooting. I don’t mean to resurrect old grievances, but SUCK ON THIS, you timid, shot-shy Gamescom people!

Link:

And it was all going so well… It’s season 3 of my Master League career in PES2010 and I’m still trying to get promoted out of Division 2. I started with the Default squad on Top Player, but I don’t think that’s an excuse any more. I’m just performing miserably, season after season, and I don’t know why. (And I love it really.)

I’ve always been a decidedly average player of Pro Evolution Soccer in all its forms. Sorry, most of its forms. Next-gen PES2008 was an exception, but given that you only had to look at that game to dribble through entire defences, that’s not saying much. No, in regular, proper PES, I rarely dribble, relying totally on pass-and-move triangles, quadrangles, and parallelograms to create openings. I only ever perform tricks by accident. An occasional stepover/knock-on with a double-tap of R1 is about as exotic as I get. And even that seems to have been nerfed in PES2010. Huh.

Here in season 3 I was top of Division 2 after the first few matches. I slipped a few places, inevitably, but I was still within touching distance of promotion. But now? Oh dear.

Don’t be fooled by the picture above. I’d love to be as high as 7th right now… After the picture was taken I hit a rocky patch and slipped back and I don’t think I’ll recover. I’m currently in 11th position, 12 points off the promotion places. Barring an unprecedented winning streak, I’m out of the running for promotion this season.

So I think I’ll be spending another season—a squirmingly embarrassing fourth season—in Division 2. I can’t put my finger on it. I play well, then I play badly, then I play indifferently, then I play badly, then I play well, then the cycle simply repeats itself and repeats itself and repeats itself (ssssh! a bit like the blog…).

The mid-season transfer window came and went. I acquired just one player: MORENO, a CB. No more. By the time 10 matches had passed I’d sensed that I’m in trouble this season. I can’t afford to encumber my team with any high-earners. I know how the logic of Master League works: you get the better players anyway. You take a risk on them knowing that they’ll likely bring you the results to pay for themselves. But I’m still too unsure of myself in the new Master League. I don’t want my hard-earned staff upgrades to be jeopardised by a financial shortfall.

Here are two goals from the current period. The first is from Gutierrez, and is a bit of a daisycutter. Note the ball’s fourfold shadow in the slow-mo, pitch-level replay. I only ever notice things like that when looking at replays. The rest of the time, fully absorbed in playing, the graphics could almost be composed of Matrix-style shifting green numbers. The second goal is a scorcher from Oscar—one of a dwindling number of notable things he’s done for me lately. The shot crashes in off the underside of the bar:

Link:

Gutierrez’s goal was a precious late winner in a tight match. Oscar’s goal gave me an early lead away to Blackburn. Sadly, Blackburn rallied strongly and I was almost a helpless spectator as they crushed me—yes, crushed me. I lost 4-1 in the end and it could have been a few more (for them).

Finally, a clip from the PES vaults of horror. I was puzzled by my failure to put an end to a CPU player’s marauding run, despite putting in what looked (and felt) like two perfectly good tackles. I paused and checked the replay. And, oh… Just look at the collision-detection going on here:

Link:

The incident above didn’t lead to a CPU goal, but it really annoyed me. In the clip there are two instances of non-collision-detection. In the first instance, I can accept that my player misses the ball—but then the CPU player’s leg passes through my player’s trailing arm as if it isn’t there. The CPU player should have tripped over my player. In the second and WORST instance, the ball clearly passes straight through my player when I had made a good slide-tackle.

I think (but don’t know for sure) that what happens in cases like this is that the game performs a behind-the-scenes roll of the dice. The success or failure of a slide tackle (for example) is determined by a number of factors. Your player’s overall rating, current stamina, current match momentum, etc., etc. If the die-roll goes against you the outcome is represented by solid objects (the ball and/or player bodyparts) magically warping through other solid objects. Like I said, I don’t know for sure that’s what happens, but it’s my best guess based on all the evidence.

After all these years of suffering the PES non-collision-detection problem, it can’t be a persistent bug across several separate editions of the game, can it? Surely, surely not. Could Seabass & co. have really left intact for all these years a whole buggy substrata of the programming code that deals with collision detection?

Who knows. I doubt we’d ever get a coherent answer. All I know is that it’s bloody infuriating—and oddly embarrassing—to see it happen, again and again and again.

Become a Legend and Master League mode are more alike than they are different. The ‘worlds’ in which they take place are virtually identical. Really the only big differences are that in BaL you play as a single player in a team, and there’s no relegation if your team finishes in the bottom 3 of the League.

One of the things that I find the same is that I can still play a Cup match without realising it. That must have happened to me dozens of times in Master League over the years. Now it’s happened to me in BaL for the first time.

I’d won a D1 Cup first leg match against Stoke. It was a tidy 1-0 victory (at home) with a pretty tidy performance from yours truly. Then I clean forgot about the imminent 2nd leg. A few matches later, I saw my next opponents were Stoke and prepared myself for a league match.

After a sequence of draws in the league I was anxious for Portsmouth to pick up our first win. Stoke went 1-0 up early on, then we somehow got it back to 1-1 just before half-time. I really wanted that win—a league win, as I thought it would be. I played completely differently from how I would have played if I’d realised this was the 2nd leg of a Cup tie (and where our away goal had effectively sealed the result). I played like a third striker—something you can easily do from a midfield berth, but you really have to make it count. You have to do something—score a goal or at least get a direct assist—for it to be counted as a good performance by the wizard-behind-the-curtain who’s in charge of your fortunes.

I never got a goal, or even had a shot or anything, and was actually subbed around the traditional 65th-70th minute mark. The match ended 1-1. Initially I was crestfallen, but then saw that it had been a Cup game all along. 1-1 was an excellent result. Doh.

Back in the league, we met Manchester United in a very atmospheric and gorgeously-lit night match. This is something I haven’t spent much time speaking about: how beautiful the field of play looks from the Vertical Wide camera angle, particularly in night matches.

There was a very suspicious opening to the Man Utd game. It was their kick-off, and I found myself almost immediately 1-0 down without anybody on our team touching the ball. There were several instances when we should have got the ball, but instead it would strangely bobble, bounce, and ricochet in the CPU team’s favour. Things did not revert to normal until the ball was in the back of our net. This happens a little too often in PES after a CPU team’s kick-off. Yes, it’s back to scripting paranoia with me. Nice to see that more traditions are carrying over from Master League.

I played like a total noob in my final match of the session. I ran around the pitch aimlessly looking for the ball, and doing nothing good with it when I did get it. I fully deserved my post-match rating of 5.5. It should have been worse. I wasn’t surprised to see myself out of the First XI for the next match. I deserved to be on the bench.

——————-

In other news, I have now played a good few games on NHL09. It’s still too early to say, but I still think it’s ‘only’ a good game rather than the amazing sports game experience I was expecting it to be.

I think this is mainly due to me not really knowing much about ice hockey. I’ve played computer games based on this sport far more than I’ve ever watched the real thing. And NHL09 is like none of the other computer game versions I’ve played.

Even on the lowest difficulty setting I don’t really know what to do. The AI is capable of slicing me up no matter what. There are various sliders to play around with to make it even easier, but I don’t want to touch them yet. It is still early days. And I can see occasional flashes of brilliance, flashes that might actually be the norm if I could just knuckle down and learn the controls. It feels foreign having to manually control player switching, but I’m slowly learning to do it. I appreciate that auto-switching would have been a nightmare with so few players on a relatively small virtual playing area, so manual switching is the only way to go.

I have scored one notable goal, which I saved for posterity. It was only notable for being an ‘in off the keeper’s shoulder’ goal, really. (I keep trying and failing to score the NHL09 equivalent of 35-yard screamers. I always could in NHL96!) In the replay, I’m the team with the white shirts jerseys, attacking towards the camera:

At the start of the clip, you can’t really tell where the puck is. This is actually one of the problems I have with ice hockey as a sport. Where the puck is it?! You can follow its progress by watching the players’ reactions, yes, but I’d rather be able to easily see the puck at all times. In NHL09 you can enable a graphical puck trail, but it only helps a little. There are still several occasions per game—in real life and in NHL09—where I lose track of the puck and have to surmise where it is by the players’ positions. Is it just me who has this difficulty with ice hockey?

Haters of FIFA’s online uploads may be cheered to learn that the speed of NHL’s uploads makes FIFA’s seem like momentary pauses. Seriously, the time they take… Sheesh. However, one thing that will make FIFA players gnash their teeth is that NHL players can save their replays locally to their hard drives if they wish. This makes me angry. Angry. I’ve yet to hear any reason at all—good or bad, believable or unbelievable—why FIFA replays can’t also be saved locally.

After waiting all this time for NHL09 I am going to give it a great chance. I think this one’s a grower. I’ll report back on how I get on in a week or two’s time. If things take off, there could even be a Dynasty Mode story (or even an NHL BaP Mode story). With PES2009’s BaL mode firmly in residence, I doubt that NHL or any other game could displace it in the near future, but it’s a long time to October. Never say never.

The driving sentiment behind Friday’s negative-sounding post still applies. I am on a downer with PES2009 at the moment.

But I don’t think this means the end for me and the game. PES2009, for all its (many) faults, is certainly no PES2008. I ended up despising PES2008 and everything it represented (i.e. betrayal, disappointment, the bitter taste of ashes…). But PES2009 will probably end up occupying roughly the same level as PES4 or PES6 in my personal pantheon of PES games. PES4 and PES6 were not strong favourites of mine. But they were still very playable, classic PESes, and I remember them both fondly. In years to come I hope I’ll recall PES2009 in the same way.

Before I take a break from PES2009 (for its sake, and my sanity’s), there’s some unfinished business to take care of. I’m almost at the end of my 11th season in Master League. I’ve been closing in on my first Treble all season. It’s closer now than ever.

I put together a 10-match winning streak that carried me back to the top of the table and opened up a nice lead. A picture paints a thousand words—looking at this one still makes me smile:

It’s my best winning streak in PES2009 so far. I sailed through to the finals of the D1 Cup and the European Cup. Man Utd gave me no trouble in the D1 Cup semi-final. In Europe, Benfica were slightly trickier. I was 3-0 up at Benfica’s place, and the tie was all but over—then I mysteriously conceded two late goals. I took the lead in the second leg at my place, but they pulled it back to 1-2—making it 4-4 on aggregate—by literally walking the ball into my net, twice.

Lapses of concentration on my part or scripting shenanigans? I call shenanigans, naturally. I hope I’m honest enough to know when I’ve lost focus and sloppily allowed the CPU back into a match, and when Seabass’s celebrated ‘momentum’ has started to exert itself. This was ‘momentum’, I am certain of it. Still, I was through on away goals. I will play Göteborg in the D1 Cup final, and Real Madrid in the European Cup final.

The two Cup finals are the big matches as far as the Treble is concerned. That winning streak has seen me start to pull away at the top of the League table with only a handful of matches left. I’ve hit serious form at just the right time. I have absolutely no idea why the below screenshot is blurry. Could my mobile phone camera’s lens have needed a wipe?

4 points clear with superior goal difference and only a handful of matches left is a great position to be in. I’m going to risk it and call the League title as mine. If I lose it from here, I don’t deserve to win anything at all in this game, ever. So the Treble will all come down to the Cups, I think.